


heavy work

by owenmeany



Category: The Dead Don't Die (2019)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Reunions, post post-apocalypse, reference to blood / gore, what to do if ur crush returns from the dead, writing absurdly specific content for my own enjoyment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23117080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owenmeany/pseuds/owenmeany
Summary: "Centreville seemed to shake itself off and resume as though a particularly bad storm had swept through and simply disturbed things in the night."
Relationships: Dean/Bobby Wiggins
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	heavy work

After the earth cooled, people woke up feeling rotten or they climbed back into the soil and stayed dead. It was funny to wake up and have no concept of the time that had passed, whole days and nights having disappeared, hours he would have idled in the shop, friends birthdays and rent payments and deadlines that had elapsed without attention. The government types that turned up and found the detention centre kids living in the woods with Hermit Bob estimated maybe five to six months had gone by since the total deterioration of society. There were emergencies, sure - people drafted into power stations to prevent nuclear fallout, thousands forcibly moved from the cities to the country to cultivate land and regrow crops, the borders were closed, there was no travel, living wild and eating dead things had wasted people’s bodies, they were full of disease - but Centreville seemed to shake itself off and resume as though a particularly bad storm had swept through and simply disturbed things in the night. 

He reopened the shop because there was nothing else to do. He let the government types clean it out first - signed the disclosure documents and wouldn’t go near it until he got the okay. He had vague memories of the bodies of his old customers, and that was enough to make him want to move away. He had found an empty bloodied pair of kids’ sneakers on his doorstep when he had woken in a field outside of town and crawled back to the shop. Little sneakers. Possibly belonging to any of the kids that visited him regularly. Whose parents might have woken up, like him, and found that their families were gone. It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Most people couldn’t cope. Mindy Morrison woke up around the same time as him - they had stumbled through those early days of new consciousness together. He assumed she would be one of the first to crawl back into the earth and wait to die for a second time. She always seemed so fragile, even without a crisis. Instead she had broken the haze by finding Officer Peterson, and then, gently, incrementally, persuading him to stick around.

Peterson himself was fascinating. He was somewhat stunted by everything that had happened, had lost an eye, was still mourning Chief Robertson. Bobby thought absently when he saw them together in the grocery store that Mindy should have been a lawyer, because Peterson barely seemed functional and yet whatever she said seemed to be the biggest cause of his reanimation. They owned a house together about three plots down from his own that he walked past on his way to work. Sometimes he would wave if Peterson was in the front yard, gardening, but not linger - he found it easier to talk to Mindy than Peterson, who for all his quiet confidence in life, had lost some sense of proportion when the chief died. 

There was very little travel afterwards, and most people that crossed state lines tended to stay and settle down. A lack of business had never particularly mattered to Bobby, given the shop made little to no profit in person and mostly sold online. It did reduce the number of visitors and occasionally he found himself longing for conversation, but that tended to pass when he thought about the sneakers, crusted with viscera, that had been propped against his cashier’s desk upon his return to the living. One of the government’s agricultural programmes did set up three miles away and then sometimes new folks would pass through for something to do once their rotation had finished. Still no one cared for comics as much as they used to - even in a small place like Centreville - and quite a few of his regulars had stayed dead. The three detention survivors, who had been taken away for a while and interviewed, moved into a place in the wood. He knew because once a month one of them came in, browsed a little, and then never bought anything. Later he would go walking in the woods to clear his head and find Hermit Bob in the most random of locations, standing guard, warding outsiders off. Don’t trust this weather, he had said once, whilst they stood together and smoked: could change at any moment. You could be right back where you started. Bobby had nodded at this and went home and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked human. He looked alive. At the very least his skin still looked alive. He felt for his pulse in his neck, and after a moment of waiting, found it. The only lasting decay was a hole in his tooth that the dentist said had probably come from a diet of raw meat and no cleaning. The dentist had some the same, and showed him, three in the bottom row at the back, and they sat together for a moment after the peal of laughter, unable to find any reason to carry on.

He had looked for Dean, afterwards; so certain that he was dead, it became obsessive, some elaborate passive method of self-harm. There was a database of the dead run through local government but Dean hadn’t lived in Centreville specifically, only travelled through on various routes. Mindy forced him to stop going, eventually, and said she’d check herself - but even then, day after day, his name never came through. One of the detention kids popped by about three months after he’d reopened the shop to ask for back issues of the Walking Dead, which he could not find in the store room or on the shelves so made a note to order it in and apologised. She smiled and browsed a bit longer, hands parsing through bargain issues in crates on the floor. It struck him that she was amused by the whole thing, or at least it seemed that way. Shyly smiling to herself, she searched, cracked up by his lack of offence over the request, or the fact that the store was still open at all. After she left, the quiet of the day resumed. It was common to have days without a single customer and so he found himself occupying his time by reading defunct storylines about crises faced by heroes that were always undone and never really lived through. Mindy came by with coffee and Peterson idled in the doorway, testing the hinges.

“I can fix these.” Peterson spoke without turning his body, as though he were addressing the door.

Mindy rolled her eyes. “Sure.” 

“Really! I just need to tighten these screws at the top…” He adjusted his grip on the frame. “With a little grease I think it’ll be fine. I’ll ask Cliff if we can borrow his tools.” It took him a moment to realise his mistake and even then he wouldn’t turn. His shoulders slumped, he regarded his shoes, and then scuffing the toe of his boot against the bottom of the open door, he stumbled to the car and sat in the passenger seat.

“He seems a little tired,” Bobby said. 

Mindy smiled. “You’re too polite.”

“Better that than anything else.” He reached over and turned off the fan. Then, with some hesitance: “You visit town hall today?”

She shook her head. “Haven’t had time.”

She studied his face and leaned in close. “I know he’s a little - different. But he needs the company. So do I.” She paused. “Won’t you come for dinner?”

He looked at the ring on her finger, the quirk of her smile. “My calendar’s empty. You name the date, I’ll be there.”

She turned and looked at Peterson in the absurd little car. Without looking back at Bobby she took his hand across the counter.

“Come tonight,” she said.

“But—” 

“Dress how you want. Don’t worry about buying anything.” She nodded her head and let go. “Just bring yourself along. That’s enough.”

He took a swig of the coffee. It burned his cheeks and his tongue but in the winter, the heat seemed to matter less. The broken AC was a painful reminder of the summer that was still foggy in his brain, but otherwise a welcome friend that made the room insulated and humid.

As she left he called after her. “I don’t close until seven.”

“Take a holiday, Bobby.” She got in and started the car. Through the open window she yelled to him. “Shut up early.”

The afternoon passed the way most did. His only customisers were the few online queries that he always sent the same routine reply to: sorry, all post is being held at state borders. Nothing we send will be with you for months. By four he had the distinct impression that Mindy was right. For some reason or another he had woken up and been given a second life, yet had no real reason to live it. Danny had died with him, lead by him, hurt by him; he woke up at night sometimes, mouth too dry to scream, breath stolen by the shadow that hung in the corner and for a moment wore Danny’s face. He still looked away from the derelict hardware store when he travelled through town on his way home. Even now, months later. 

He turned up the radio, some kind of talismanic ritual; before he had always been cautious, thinking that Dean might judge his music taste. Now he invited it, waiting for him to stroll in and frown in that reserved way of his. 

He cleared the shop floor and turned out the lights, locking up the stockroom and his front doors. On the porch he sat for a minute and smoked. It was a bad habit, but one he had given up trying to solve since he had died the summer before. He shut his eyes and felt the low winter sun across his face. It was barely warm. Distantly there was a rumbling in the earth. His heart twisted in his chest. Perhaps this was the reckoning, the Hermit’s promised change in the weather. Come, then, he thought, and pressed the end of the cigarette into his arm, hoping it might carry him through whatever was next with some memory of feeling. The rumbling stopped. The brakes of a vehicle whined. 

“Bilbo?” It was like hearing music in a dream. Familiar and unearthly. Totally separate from real life, impossible to recreate. “What are you doing?”

Gentle hands took the cigarette away, moving a thumb over the tender burn on his wrist. 

“Why won’t you open your eyes, man?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to wake up.”

The hands cradled his own, squeezed them tightly, and moved to grasp his face. 

“You’re awake,” said the voice, which made his throat close up. Unfair that the scrambled egg of his brain matter, what was left of it after a partially undead state and some kind of botched resurrection, would somehow succeed in a perfect rendition of that distant voice. The hands moved over his cheek, a finger brushing his hair. “You can open your eyes.”

He did. He was crying, the tears and the movement without noise. Dean crouched in front of him, package at his feet. He let go of Bobby’s face. 

“Why are you crying, Bilbo?”

He blinked. The van parked down the path was beaten up, markedly different to Dean’s old sleek one. 

“Are you real?”

Dean laughed and stood. Where he stood, he blocked the sun; or maybe it had finally dipped below the horizon. In the low light there was something electric about his face, his features tethered together by a strange and unknown energy. 

“Of course.” He grinned. “I woke up, same as you. Not far from here, actually.”

“Then why—” Dean offered him a hand up, which he took, rising on unsteady feet. “Why did it take you so long?”

“I don’t understand.” He knelt and retrieved the package. 

“To come back.” Almost unsaid, emanating in the strange cramps in his throat and chest: “To me.”

Dean smiled. “I did.” He offered Bobby a hand. It was missing a ring finger. The stump had healed over. As Bobby stood, pulled up by Dean’s firm grasp, he began to notice more and more tiny cracks. A little slit through the side of one of Dean’s nostrils, like some bungled piercing, part of his ear lobe misshapen, a criss cross of fleshy scars up his left arm. It was easier than looking him straight in the eyes, which still made Bobby a little nauseous; but he found himself drawn anyway. Dean regarded him gently and moved his thumb over the back of Bobby’s hand. 

“I waited for you.” He squeezed Dean’s hand. “I thought maybe.” He stopped himself; the feeling that Dean might be dead and that in some way it was his fault was not so much a thought as it was known. When he lay in bed at night he would force himself to remember every concrete fact they had ever said to one another, trying to catalogue when Dean was born and where he grew up, his dad’s name, his favourite colour, as if that would really mean anything, or keep anything alive. Every day he had been to the registry to consult the growing list of those dead and not returning. “You were gone,” he said, with some finality.

“I came back a couple of times once I sorted myself out.” He grimaced. “I wasn’t so pretty when I first woke up.”

Bobby, in all his grotesque excitement, felt some keen urge to show him they were the same; the back teeth with holes in them, the sealed gash that ran from armpit to belly button, the reoccurring cramps in his ankles where the bones felt wrongly healed from misremembered breaks. 

“The place was all boarded up. Government types in hazmat suits disinfecting everything. Whenever I had the chance I would sit and wait.” Dean stepped back and looked up at the front of the store. “But you never came back.”

“They made me do that!” He stepped back a little, indignant. “They said I couldn’t go back without them cleaning it up.”

“Yeah.” Dean smiled, though the expression seemed heavy, and pulled the rest of his face with it. “Well. That happened enough that I realised I didn’t want to know if you’d - gone.”

They looked at one another. The quality of the light was shifting. The oncoming evening seemed aerated, light, filled with particulates of dust and air. 

“Let me drive you home,” said Dean, and took him gently by the arm. 

“I have to go to Mindy’s house.”

“Who?” Dean frowned as he held open the van door for Bobby.

“Officer Morrison. My neighbour.”

Dean shrugged and closed it. When he got in front of the wheel, he paused and spoke slowly. “I can drop you wherever you need to be.”

That’s with you, Bobby almost said, and dug his nails into his thigh to keep from moving. “Thanks,” he said, and keyed the address into the beaten up satnav. The van was decrepit. In the passenger seat with bursting seams, Bobby put his hand against the window and marked the glass with his fingertips. “What do you do now?”

Dean shrugged as he pulled out onto the road. “I’m a driver. There’s a farm, a few miles out.” The dust in the car had risen, displaced by Bobby occupying the passenger seat. This caught the light like glitter. “I cart things around for them.”

“Heavy work?” Bobby left a hand by the gear shift. Palm open, fingers twitching, some kind of offering. 

After a moment, looking in the rearview mirrors as he adjusted his seat, Dean took it in his own. “Repetitive. But no worse than the package stuff before.”

Bobby played with the dial on the radio. There was almost nothing to offer. Occasionally the college two or three hours drive away would have its station co-opted by government types outlining survival procedures; what food could be accessed and from where, health clinics, various labour shortages in agricultural projects. But quite often - and he knew this from hours spent at home, trying to conjure any kind of communication on his kitchen radio with the outside world, his sister, his friends, the people he went to school with - there was nothing but static. One unbroken distorted groan, not quite nothing but possessing no substance.

“How did you know to come back?” He felt each of Dean’s fingers around his own. Some feeling was thrumming under his skin that he could not control. “Why now?”

He laughed, quiet, and seemingly for himself. “One of the feral kids that lives out in the woods came to my house. He says ‘Have you been the comic store in Centreville lately?’ I thought it was some spy shit. Because all he said was that and then he ran when I tried to follow. I thought it over for a long time. I didn’t want confirmation either way. About you. But then I finished my shipment early today and I just thought - it’s now. It’s gotta be now. I need to know.”

They sat in silence holding hands whilst Bobby felt warm and could not speak. He felt as though his chest might expand, leak something of this feeling out onto the dashboard and the footwell and the seats, aged as they were. 

Dean pulled up outside Mindy’s house. “Here you are.”

“Here I am.” He didn’t move. “Would you like to come in for dinner?”

Dean looked out the window and at the front curtains, which moved as someone peered through them. “I’m okay. But thank you.”

He felt his fingers move in his own. “Why did you come and find me, Dean?” Saying his name felt precious, careful; a finite resource he might use up.

He shrugged, let go of Bobby, and moved to put a hand on the back of his neck. “I already told you.”

“But why me?”

“I’m trying to figure out how to put everything back together.” He turned the radio off. “I don’t think there’s much point in doing that without you.”

Bobby put a hand on his arm, shifting closer. Dean turned. He put a hand under his chin. It was something Bobby felt recognition for - in dreams, in fantasies, the number of times he had imagined reaching for him, pulling him down. It struck him that the dreams used to make him afraid, but now, where his hand cradled Dean’s neck, there were scars on his palms and wrists from lost time, and the same on Dean’s skin. Just under his jawline was the pulpy scar of a bite, which Bobby ran his fingers over.

“Bilbo,” Dean said, his face lifting like before, cracking open with the force of his grin. He looked down, into his lap, and then at Bobby. With a tentative hand he held the back of Bobby’s head and kissed him.

Eventually he put a hand to his chest and pressed him back, breathing hard. “Please come in for dinner.”

Dean rolled his eyes. 

“I don’t want to do anything anymore unless you’re there too.” Dean looked at him for a long moment, eyes wide. “I’m serious. That’s the only life I want.”

Dean closed his eyes and cut the engine. When he opened them he took Bobby’s hand again. With his other hand he pressed a finger to his pulse. 

“Not dreaming,” he said. “Still alive?”

Something twisted inside Bobby’s chest. “Still alive.”

“Alright,” he said, and leaned in, a hand on either side of Bobby’s face. He kissed him again, slow and generous. At Mindy’s front door, he put an arm around Bobby’s shoulder and hugged him close. “Still alive,” he murmured, and pressed his lips to Bobby’s forehead.

**Author's Note:**

> i am becoming a bad imitation of that post where it's like .... became a writer accidentally by writing absurdly specific content for myself. i don't know why i wrote this. maybe because afterwards me and my mum agreed on a film for the first time ever & that was because we both thought bobby was in love with dean. who wouldn't be? but maybe also because i just love paterson so much and i haven't figured out a way to express that in writing yet. thanks for reading!
> 
> im on tumblr here [(x)](https://om-johnirv.tumblr.com)


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